New Media and Youth Political Engagement
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New Media and Youth Political Engagement Peter John Chen 1
& Milica
Stilinovic 1
Received: 26 November 2019 / Revised: 19 April 2020 / Accepted: 22 April 2020 # Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Abstract This article critically examines the role new media can play in the political engagement of young people in Australia. Moving away from “deficit” descriptions, which assert low levels of political engagement among young people, it argues two major points. First, that there is a well-established model of contemporary political mobilisation that employs both new media and large data analysis that can and have been effectively applied to young people in electoral and non-electoral contexts. Second, that new media, and particularly social media, are not democratic by nature. Their general use and adoption by young and older people do not necessarily cultivate democratic values. This is primarily due to the type of participation afforded in the emerging “surveillance economy”. The article argues that a focus on scale as drivers of influence, the underlying foundation of their affordances based on algorithms, and the centralised editorial control of these platforms make them highly participative, but unequal sites for political socialisation and practice. Thus, recent examples of youth mobilisation, such as seen in recent climate justice movements, should be seen through the lens of cycles of contestation, rather than as technologically determined. Keywords Australia . Young people . Participation . Democracy . Social media .
Determinism
Introduction At the turn of the century, considerable interest was focused on new internet-based technologies and their potential to stimulate democratic improvements around the world. Attention was particularly given to their role in revitalising the public
* Peter John Chen [email protected] Milica Stilinovic [email protected]
1
Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
Journal of Applied Youth Studies
sphere, that performative “space” in which individuals have both the right and access to discuss societal problems freely and openly (Rheingold 1993; Grossman 1995). This link was assumed possible through a combination of technological determinism, which assumes that technologies shape sociopolitical environments and cultural values (Winner 1989), along with a strong emphasis on the capacity of individual agency to overcome economic and political challenges (Ferdinand 2000). This “heroic individualism” was seen in the free market ethos of Silicon Valley (Marwick 2013), promoted a combination of individual sovereignty and disruptive innovation in the development of technologies that support access to information. As such, a decentralised and unregulated internet was assumed a technology that promoted freedom of speech, personal expression and the free exchange of political discourse among open societies. Illustrating this premise, Benkler (2006) in The Wealth of Networks wrote that the int
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